Past Webinars

  • November 11, 2021 Content authors need to consider many factors while converting their existing content to structured content, including analyzing the content at its source. This exercise is interesting yet challenging, vexing, but rewarding. But what are those factors you need to think about for this conversion? For starters, you need to consider:
    • Character styles and how they are assigned (Use the style named Emphasis? Press Ctrl+I? Use a toolbar icon? Is there a difference?)
    • Paragraph styles and how they are assigned (Did you skip bullet 1 and go right to bullet 2 because it looks better and, if you did, what does it mean?)
    • Images and how to import them (Did you copy/paste or use the import setting? If so, how did you import it? As a link to the source?)
    • Links between files or the web (Did it just get typed in, or was this inserted using a linking tool? How will it convert?)
    • Page layout, tables, design, variables, equations, and so on
    What do you actually need to do to start analyzing the content? How do you deconstruct your source documents? What can you do with just the features available in your authoring tool to make it easier to comprehend what you are dealing with? In this webinar, we will identify the most common “gotcha” issues, share a few useful tips and tricks to reduce the volume of these glitches, and offer you a sneak peek into the workflow to take legacy content and plan your conversion to structured content. Although this is not a ‘one and done’ approach, this session should give you a fair idea about the early steps you need to consider while thinking about DITA, content strategy, content management systems, and automating of the conversion process from ‘been there’ to ‘done that.’ Presented by: Bernard Aschwanden is an Adobe Consultant and the CEO of Publishing Smarter.  A service provider specialized in content creation, management, and distribution, headquartered in Barrie, Canada. Bernard Aschwanden and his company Publishing Smarter, help clients reduce costs and improve the quality of content.  A past President of the Society for Technical Communications, he trains, writes, and presents on communications, publishing, and single-source reuse. Publishing Smarter helps companies automate content processes to publish better, faster, and smarter and provide a maximum return on investments.  Bernard Aschwanden on LinkedIn@aschwanden4stc on Twitter@publishsmarter on Twitterwww.publishingsmarter.com
  • September 29, 2021 Not all Analytics are created equal. Nor are they fit for the same purpose. Google Analytics and other web analytics tools are incredibly helpful for marketing content. But when it comes to product documentation, they are outranged by dedicated Content Analytics. Next-gen Content Analytics is designed for technical content and understand the complexity and structure of your documentation down to the topic level. Far beyond the web analytics capabilities, they generate the type of insights that benefit not only the tech content professionals but the entire organization. In this webinar, you will learn how the documentation team can capture meaningful content metrics and drive change and improvement to the content, the product, and ultimately to customer service and user satisfaction leveraging dedicated Content Analytics. Presented by: Fabrice Lacroix is a serial entrepreneur and a technology pioneer. He has been working for 25 years on the development of innovative solutions around search technology, content enrichment and AI. He is the founder of Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation.
  • March 31, 2021 How do you ensure that your content is consistent and follows your brand’s guidelines? How do you begin a project that’s consistent across your technical communications? Is it an achievable goal? What results should I expect? In this webinar, learn how the combination of easyDITA's CCMS and HyperSTE allows you to check your content against your specific style guide, as well as industry standard grammar and terminology rules. The result is not only scalable and single-sourced content, but clear and concise content across the board. Content that's more cost effective, brand aligned, and ready to attract new customers. Attendees will learn:
    • The value of combining an XML CCMS with a Grammarly-like content checker
    • A live demo of easyDITA with HyperSTE that shows how the tools work together to help content creators
    • A general project plan to help you get started in achieving great results
    • An example of a customer implementation and their results
    Presented by: Berry Braster has been in the technical documentation field for over 18 years and has helped implement content strategies, including the use of DITA and HyperSTE controlled language software. As Technology Director, Berry is involved with connecting technical documentation to IoT, and how to leverage on technologies like Augmented and Virtual Reality. Dushko Radevski is a Senior Solutions Representative at Jorsek, the makers of easyDITA. Dushko is best described as a problem solver. Every day, he invests his days working closely with technical documentation teams who are looking for help with their document creation and publishing problems. Dushko is exceptional at helping to identify underlying issues and bringing the most effective solution to the table. Outside of his role at Jorsek, Dushko has an interest in languages and is currently studying German to add to his multilingual communications capabilities.
  • April 8, 2020 Technical Communication is in constant change: Requirements and expectations from both authors and consumers of technical content have changed dramatically over the last decade. The rise in digital experience innovation creates new customer expectations and demands. And enterprises around the world are exploring new ways to create new Content Interaction Experiences for their customers. In this presentation, Stefan Gentz will give insights from the Adobe Technical Communication Worldwide Survey 2019/2020. TechComm professionals from 60 countries participated in the survey. He will discuss the driving factors for enterprises around the world when it comes to technical communication. Why do companies choose to work with structured content, and why do they go for a CCMS? How do they deliver their content today – and how will they provide content tomorrow? KEY TAKEAWAYS
    • Understand the key factors that are driving companies to move to structured content
    • Understand which technologies companies use to author and deliver content today
    • Know which are the “hottest” content delivery channels in the future to provide technical content to customers
    Presented by: Stefan Gentz the Global Evangelist for Technical Communication at Adobe. Stefan’s mission is to inspire enterprises and technical writers around the world and show how to create compelling technical communication content with the Adobe TCS tools. Stefan is also a certified Quality Management Professional (TÜV), ISO 9001 / EN 15038 auditor, ISO 31000 Risk Management expert and Six Sigma Champion. Stefan is a popular keynote speaker and moderator at conferences such as tekom, tcworld, Information Energy, Intelligent Content Conference, Congility, LocWorld, TCUK, STC, GALA, ELIA, TTT, Translation Forum Russia and many other. He is also a member of the Conference Advisory Board of the world’s biggest TechComm event, the tekom / tcworld Conferences, and an Ambassador for the Globalization and Localization Association. He is also an active social networker on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
  • April 6, 2022 Content reuse is one of the many advantages of moving to DITA and a structured standard. It helps us reduce the amount of overall content we have, improve consistency, and decrease redundancy. However, it is difficult to visualize this value before the conversion takes place. Estimates can be off, and it is hardly ever clear how much content we can actually reuse from our documentation. Typos and partial matches only complicate our futile estimates. Narrowing the scope of this approximation by investigating similar matches in our source content before conversion can provide valuable insight to the potential benefits of moving to a structured standard. Join TJ Dhaliwal in this session as he uses Stilo’s Analyzer and Migrate to investigate source content for similar and exact matches. Then, further use that information to plan for conrefs, keyrefs, and topicrefs before any transformation takes place. Conclude by deduplicating exact topic matches and realizing some of the potential that was uncovered in the beginning.   Presented by: TJ Dhaliwal is a Technical Sales Product Specialist at Stilo, helping customers uncover solutions to their content conversion needs. With a strong technical background in engineering combined with a passion for public speaking, he’s been able to successfully bridge the gaps between project stakeholders. As a problem solver, TJ has helped several enterprise-level companies convert tens of thousands of pages of their content to DITA.  He’s recently taken lead on and helped bring to market Stilo’s newest product, Analyzer.
  • October 12, 2021 For high tech companies, how to initiate requirements for a CCMS technical product documentation project; develop ROI justification metrics for Executive Management, and conduct a successful implementation.
    • What were the main drivers for you and the company to embark on a CCMS Project?
    • What were the deficiencies of the current CCMS that you were using?
    • How did you obtain C Level Management approval to embrace the initiative and what were the ROI and performance metrics used to evaluate the success of the project?
    • What was the most challenging issue that you encountered during the implementation process and how did you resolve it?
      Presented by: Michael Rosinski has lead a successful career as a technology executive in the enterprise software industry. Presently, Michael is President of Astoria Software which is the premier CCMS – Component Content Management System in the Technical Product Documentation Vertical. At Astoria, he was the first to market to launch the Enterprise SaaS Model and Mobility Platforms. Michael merged the Goldman Sachs venture with TransPerfect, the largest private translation company in the world. Nick Wilhelm started in Graphic design, moved into MDM software training/implementation, and is currently working in technical content development/strategy. For the last 4 years, Nick has been a lead content developer and CCMS administrator at a worldwide testing and measurement product company, Tektronix. He has successfully helped Tektronix transition to a new CCMS tool (Astoria) while working with the engineering and marketing teams to continually improve how Tektronix presents technical content to their customers. Maria-Hélène Soria started working in STMicroelectronics in 1989 as an IT Support engineer on Manufacturing solutions. After 5 years managing IT CAD infrastructures for ST R&D, Maria-Hélène took charge of the patent, project management, and technical literature IT solutions with teams located in France, Italy, and India. For the last 4 years, Maria-Hélène leads the Enterprise Content Management IT solutions team with more than 10 000 internal users at STMicroelectronics. Marc Medjad joined STMicroelectronics in 1995. After several positions in IT & Quality domains as a Program Manager, he has been working for 7 years about the rollout of DITA to a community of technical writers & authors, includes the introduction of a new CCMS, a new way of authoring content, and the localization process.
  • July 15, 2020 The Fourth Industrial Revolution, sometimes described as the perfect storm of new technologies combined with the asteroid of digital information, has forced companies to adopt new organizational structures to create and distribute content. This presentation will define the new exponential organizations, companies that grow often at 10 times faster than comparable companies, and are guided by a massive transformational purpose to deliver Information Enablement through innovations such as “Content as A Service” – CAAS. Presented by: Michael Rosinski has lead a successful career as a technology executive in the enterprise software industry. Presently, Michael is President of Astoria Software which is the premier CCMS – Component Content Management System in the Technical Product Documentation Vertical. At Astoria, he was first to market to launch the Enterprise SaaS Model and Mobility Platforms. Michael merged the Goldman Sachs venture to TransPerfect, the largest private translation company in the world. Prior to Astoria, Michael was a founding member of American Software’s management team, grew revenues to $ 100M+ and made it to the Forbes Best 200 Small Companies in America list. At American, Michael completed one of the first IPO’s in the ERP market, and later contributed to the successful spin off IPO of Logility in the Supply Chain Management Space. Michael leveraged his international experience as President of Augeo Software, a French/Dutch company in the PSA Professional Automation Space where Computerworld designated them as one of “The Top 100 Companies to Watch” Michael also held Management positions at Johnson & Johnson and Nestle.. Michael holds a Bachelors Degree in Management and Organizational Behavior at Rider University, and has completed MBA study at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
  • Recorded: April 13, 2022
    graphic loog for Acrolinx - with text Better Content. Fastercolorful box next the words Kaleidoscope - Taking your content global Presented by Michael Klemme and Klaus Fleischmann

    Terminology is at the core of great content. When used consistently, it helps you communicate precisely and efficiently, which is an approach to your brand communication. It also makes your content accurate.

    But it’s important to have a sound process in place to manage your terminology. Join us and learn how to:

    • Make sure all stakeholders have input into your terminology set

    • Set a process for consent and approval of your terms

    • Make sure you have a consistent and failsafe process to

      • Have all your terms for checking in Acrolinx, as the content quality solution of choice

      • Make sure all terminology action is concentrated in quickTerm, as the leading terminology system

    Presented by:

    Michael Klemme is a Senior Solutions Architect at Acrolinx. He advises new and existing customers on how they can efficiently integrate Acrolinx into their processes and helps partners to develop integrations.

    Klaus Fleischmann studied translation and IT in Vienna, holds an MA in Conference Interpreting from Monterey, California, and a MAS in Technical Communication from Krems, Austria. In 1996, he founded Austria-based Kaleidoscope, a company implementing content, translation, and terminology management processes for internationally active companies. Kaleidoscope develops online collaboration software for enterprise-level terminology workflow, translator query management, in-country review etc., making the translation quality process comprehensible and strategically manageable. In 2007, he became CEO of Austria´s leading LSP, Eurocom Translation Services GmbH. Always active in the industry, Klaus got voted into the Gala Board of Directors in 2015 and 2017.
  • March 24, 2021 Every organization has different content management needs. The needs can be pretty broad or hyper-focused. Everybody has different expectations around the user interface, but the underlying requirements are always based on rich capabilities around legacy content ingestion, authoring, metadata management, storage, delivery, and more. Developing a content strategy is crucial to the success of your CCMS project. Core components help focus your questions, create detailed use cases, and identify candidate departments and content to help assess a CCMS. When you start a CCMS assessment, you should have a comprehensive set of parameters to guide you. It is very important to make the proper discovery and choose the solution which is the right fit. Otherwise, energy is expended to force-fit a solution which usually leads to frustration and wasted resources. Join Divraj Singh, Sr. Solutions Consultant at Adobe, in a conversation with Bernard Aschwanden, CEO at Publishing Smarter, whose organization has done multiple CCMS migrations, to understand the following parameters which will make a CCMS evaluation process easy. They will be leveraging Adobe’s CCMS solution –XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager, to showcase some of these workflows.
    • What difference does authoring standard make (unstructured, XML, DITA, HTML etc.)?
    • How advanced are the content management capabilities (web vs offline, metadata support, advanced search)?
    • How does the solution provision for storage (versioning, DAM capabilities etc.)?
    • What OOTB workflows does the solution support (review, translation, task management, content ingestion, etc.)?
    • What reporting capabilities does it have?
    • What publishing capabilities does it provide(DITA OT, integrated tools, third-party plug-ins)?
    • How extensible is the solution (APIs, DITA specializations, integration with external systems)?
    Presented by: Divraj Singh is a Senior Solution Consultant at Adobe, headquartered in San Jose, CA, USA. As a Senior Solution Consultant at Adobe, Divraj Singh leads consulting for Adobe’s CCMS offering – XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager. Divraj has over 12 years of software development and technical management experience. He is a seasoned expert in the field of content management with experience working on various WCMS systems and enterprise solutions. He has worked on various software products spanning different technologies involving mobile-web, analytics, personalization, social applicable to several domains like finance, marketing, retail, and healthcare. Divraj on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/divrajsingh/ Website
    Bernard Aschwanden is the Founder of Publishing Smarter. Bernard Aschwanden and his company Publishing Smarter help clients reduce costs and improve the quality of content. A past President of the Society for Technical Communications, he trains, writes, and presents on communications, publishing, and single-source reuse. Publishing Smarter helps companies automate content processes to publish better, faster, and smarter and provide a maximum return on investments. Bernard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernardaschwanden/ Bernard on Twitter: https://twitter.com/aschwanden4stc https://twitter.com/publishsmarter Website
  • December 1, 2021 Developing robust content models can never be a once-and-done endeavor where IAs are required to incorporate all aspects into the design prior to authoring. Instead, an iterative approach is needed to allow for incremental improvements not just during setup but long into production. Join Precision Content’s President and Chief Information Architect, Rob Hanna, to explore methods the company uses to refine models and update the content corpus through scheduled refactoring activities. Presented by: Rob Hanna is an award-winning technical writer and content strategist and an industry leading expert in structured XML authoring, DITA, and content management. In 2014, Rob was awarded the rank of Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and earned the Enterprise Content Management Specialist (ECMs) designation from AIIM. In 2017, he was named one of the top 25 global leaders in content experience strategy by Mind Touch. He founded Precision Content in 2013 after nearly 20 years in the industry as a technical writer, information architect, knowledge management specialist, and taxonomy expert. In 2018, Precision Content joined Google, Adobe, and Acrolinx on the list of "Top 100 Companies that Matter Most in Digital Content Industry" by EContent Magazine. See http://www.linkedin.com/in/singlesourceror for more information.
  • April 21, 2021 The Plain Writing Act of 2010 requires federal agencies to follow plain language guidelines for government documentation. In addition, Section 508 standards require all information and communications technology to be accessible to disabled users. Besides meeting these requirements, are there other advantages for technical writers who use plain language? Yes, there are! Brenda Inman and Deb Bissantz will explore examples of overly verbose information that can be written using plain language to convey the information more clearly. While exploring these examples, Brenda and Deb will also share benefits, guidelines, and tips for using plain language. What can the audience expect to learn? Attendees will learn to recognize opportunities for using plain language, such as when to use a $0.50 word instead of a $5.00 word. Attendees will also learn tips for writing clear, concise information using plain language. Presented by: Deb Bissantz is a Content Services manager for GlobalLink CCMS. Deb’s mission is to partner with organizations to make the most of their DITA and component content management solutions. Before joining GlobalLink CCMS, Deb worked with and authored DITA content for many years. As a writer and tools administrator, she helped several organizations migrate technical documentation to DITA and to a CCMS. Deb is a voting member of the DITA Technical Committee. Brenda Inman is the Director of Technical Publications for Robotics and Digital Solutions at Ethicon, part of the Johnson & Johnson family of companies. Brenda has worked in the medical device her entire career mostly within technical publications and localization and also has experience in clinical research and regulatory affairs. Brenda’s experience within technical publications and localization includes writing user manual content, implementation of content management systems, and setting up best practices for writing and localization.
  • November 18, 2020 Learn how HubSpot Academy, the world’s leader in providing inbound sales, marketing and customer service education, adopted DITA to help solve their content creation, conversion and output needs. HubSpot’s use case is exciting and unique as it pushes the boundaries of what we typically associate with DITA. Rather than producing typical technical documentation, HubSpot is using DITA to produce:
    • Complete lessons, courses, and certifications
    • Learning assessments
    • Powerpoint outputs
    • And localizing that content in five languages
    Think you know DITA? Just wait till you see the level of flexibility and scalability that HubSpot was able to bring to their content operations through the implementation of the DITA standard. This presentation will describe the implementation as it relates to changes in processes, tools, and employee behavior and skills. Presented by: Maria McCarthy started her career as an electrical engineer, with a B.S.in Electrical Engineering and Physics. She worked in the nuclear industry, and transitioned to project management in networks and communications. While raising 4 children, she saw the great need for STEM education, and wanted to help drive equity in education. Maria completed her M.Ed in curriculum and instruction and changed my career path to STEM education, curriculum development and instructional design. She spent time in the secondary and post-secondary classroom. Maria loves delivering professional development to adult learners, developing eLearning, and managing learning content management systems. She is passionate about eLearning and thrives on learning about new technologies and innovating together with others. At HubSpot, she manages the Academy Operations teams, which includes learning and development, content editing, localization processes, and the content management system. Jarod Sickler is the Documentation Manager and a Customer Success Manager at Jorsek Inc., makers of easyDITA, where he oversees the Jorsek documentation site and is involved in managing complex customer implementations of easyDITA. Simultaneously, he’s a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester, specializing in metaphysics and epistemology. His dissertation focuses on the role and importance of the grounding relation in the overall metaphysical structure of epistemic justification. Slowly but surely, he’s making progress on his thesis. If you’re in the market for an effective sleep aid, he’ll happily share his research with you. Whether it’s in his research, documentation, or customer implementations, Jarod enjoys thinking through complex problems and finding the simplest and yet most powerful solution. In his spare time, Jarod tries to convince his kids that he’s still cool. They aren’t buying it.
  • April 11, 2019 Salesforce is ubiquitous. It is being used to drive self-service portals, support internal staff, increase sales, and much more. However, Salesforce can now be made more powerful and give you even greater competitive advantage. Whether you are using Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, or Community Cloud, you are sharing your information. Bluestream will show how you can help your customers to easily find great support information through community searches, right beside your community forums, blog posts, and Salesforce KB articles. Dynamically update content through Bluestream’s end-to-end solution. Use XDocs’ sophisticated tags to customize information based on user profiles, permissions, and languages, and deliver customer- and configuration-specific documents, policies, or procedures. Presenter: Rik Page is Sales and Marketing Director at Bluestream Software and has been working with both component content and document management solutions since 2001. During this time he has worked with custom DTDs and Schemas, S1000D, iSpec2200 and DITA. His experience covers a wide range of industries including education, banking and finance, manufacturing and healthcare. A keen advocate of technology and innovation Rik has taken part in multiple consultancy projects and helped formulate solutions all over the world.
  • January 9, 2019 New privacy regulations (EU’s GDPR, US’s Privacy Shield, and others) are introducing a regime of strict consumer protections. Companies will have to comply with: requiring opt-in to data gathering, rather than opt-out; enhanced protection measures; data protection officers; transparency about data breaches; and many others. We will review the constraints imposed by these regulations, what they mean in terms of content delivery platforms, and how enterprises can meet them and compete successfully in lucrative growing markets. Presented by: Fabrice Lacroix is a known Web pioneer and the founder of Antidot, the company that puts enterprise content to work. As an entrepreneur, he has been working for 25 years on the development of the Internet and of the Web through several major companies.
  • January 12, 2022 Moving to structured authoring and implementing a CMS are critical projects that will generate long-term efficiency gains and significant savings. But before you get there, there are great hurdles to overcome. First and foremost, there's winning budget approval from your execs, who will have a singular focus on risk and ROI. Second, you need to maintain a high level of commitment and buy-in from those executives over the years that re-engineering of content production can last. Too many content restructuring projects fail or don’t even start because they cannot demonstrate a quick and tangible return on investment - and this is where Dynamic Content Delivery changes the game. Dynamic Content Delivery provides outstanding content experiences to your users and creates immediate value for your company without requiring a big bang in your writing process. It earns you internal support, money, and time you can leverage to optimize your content restructuring process. In this webinar, you will learn:
    • How Dynamic Content Delivery generates value from your existing content, no matter the writing tools and methods you are using now
    • How to achieve quick wins and build a fast ROI to gain support from your Execs for your content project
    • How to optimize your project to move to structured authoring and make it a success
    Presented by: Fabrice Lacroix is a serial entrepreneur and a technology pioneer. He has been working for 25 years on the development of innovative solutions around search technology, content enrichment, and AI. He is the founder of Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read, and interact with technical documentation.
  • October 6, 2021 Our content shapes experiences and drives behavior. The question then becomes, is your content causing positive or negative experiences and behaviors? In this presentation, we’ll take a critical look at content operations (Content Ops), the processes behind your knowledge, and how they make or break customer experiences. You’ll learn:
    • Tactics to turn your haphazard workflow into a repeatable process
    • Overlooked signs that your content hinders customer experience
    • How to ensure your content capability can scale with your company’s growth
      Presented by: Patrick Bosek, CEO of Heretto, loves all things content and applies his technical acumen to developing, productizing, and solving problems with product content software. Outside of that, he rides his motorcycle and makes coffee that makes him feel as fast as his motorcycle. He lives in Rochester, NY, with his son, Ezra, and a dog named Lloyd.
  • March 17, 2021 Xeditor is a professional online XML editor based on state-of-the-art web standards. With Xeditor, structured, semantically correct content in XML format can be created intuitively, efficiently and without technical knowledge. By enabling authors to work together on structured content from any location at any time, Xeditor helps companies put efficient workflows in place. This way, companies are able to take advantage of all the benefits of standardized content - such as automated further processing - without the need for costly training for authors. Presented by: Matthias Kraus is the founder and managing director of Xpublisher GmbH. Since 2001, he has been advising numerous leading international companies and organizations from the aerospace, technology, education, publishing, public administration and many other industries in the field of multi-channel publishing and accompanying them on their way to digitization.
  • February 6, 2019 With Salesforce supporting many customer-centric processes, it must be able to leverage the technical documentation that’s needed to increase efficiency of these processes. And yet, despite being built around a comprehensive and extensible data model, Salesforce is not equipped for storing and delivering technical content. So what should you do when you are asked to integrate tech doc inside Salesforce? Fortunately, options are available for solving this challenge and making relevant technical content available to support staff and customers. Presented by: Fabrice Lacroix is a known Web pioneer and the founder of Antidot, the company that puts enterprise content to work. As an entrepreneur, he has been working for 25 years on the development of the Internet and of the Web through several major companies.
  • February 15, 2022 Just putting your technical documentation on your webpage as a PDF for download will not make you a content hero. PDF is a given – a fundamental requirement. However, both business leaders and end customers expect more than just a documentation portal or a well-designed PDF. They want contextually relevant, personalized, consistent, conversational, and scalable content experiences. But how to deliver on this expectation? In this session, Stefan Gentz, Senior Worldwide Evangelist for Technical Communication at Adobe, will share some insights from the recent Adobe-commissioned Forrester study. Forrester surveyed 450 decision-makers on Content Experience Management to understand how global brands deliver relevant and contextual experiences across touchpoints. He will explore the design of positive customer journeys from marketing to technical support and self-service and back to sales – experiences that provide 360° content experience for your customers and handhold them across their whole content journey. Presented by: Stefan’s mission is to inspire enterprises and technical writers around the world and show how to create compelling technical communication content with the Adobe Technical Communication tools. He is also a certified Quality Management Professional (TÜV), ISO 9001 / EN 15038 auditor, ISO 31000 Risk Management expert, and Six Sigma Champion. As a sought-after keynote speaker and moderator at conferences around the world, he travels around the globe half of the year. Besides that, he has been the European Ambassador for the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) for many years, a member of the tekom Conference Advisory Board for several years, and is now a member of the tekom iiRDS working group for Intelligent Information and member of the OASIS DITA Adoption Committee. In 2016, Stefan Gentz was awarded by MindTouch as one of the Top 25 Leading Content Strategist Influencers in the world and as one of the Top 25 Content Experience Influencers in the world in 2017. Stefan Gentz on LinkedIn Stefan Gentz on XING @stefangentz on Twitter www.adobe.com
  • December 8, 2021 Kaarin Gordon discusses the choices and challenges for efficient content reuse facing Pharmaceutical and Clinical Research Organizations. What they want is a set of tools and platforms for easy content reuse, automatic propagation of changes from a single source, and content governance. What they have is Microsoft Word; it’s easy to use but limited to cut-n-paste content reuse. What they must deliver is multi-lingual content for a variety of uses – faster, more cost-effectively, and at lower risk. Join Eric Kuhnen in conversation with Kaarin Gordon for an engaging discussion of how component content management systems amplify or ameliorate some of the difficult content complexities that organizations face today. Presented by: As the Vice President of Life Sciences Technology Solutions at TransPerfect, Kaarin Gordon works closely with organizations on solutions to more effectively develop, manage, translate, and deliver multilingual content. She has spent 20+ years working with pharma, CROs, and medical device companies and focused on developing and implementing solutions that address global content challenges and result in decreased cycle time, reduced risk, increased consistency, and lower costs. Kaarin has a BA from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Columbia University. Eric Kuhnen is the President of GlobalLink Vasont, one of TransPerfect’s GlobalLink CCMS solutions. He has more than 30 years of experience in product research, development, and management. Prior to his current role, managed global operations, product management, pre-sales, and marketing for Astoria Software, a division of TransPerfect, Inc. He has also held profit-loss responsibilities with GoRemote and Oracle Corporation. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.
  • December 14, 2021 Attend this webinar if you’re looking to:
    • Provide your audience with content that is accurate and compliant
    • Align your global workforce with One Voice
    • Accelerate your time to market thanks to less time for review and editing
    • Reduce your source content and translations by 40%
    • Show industry credibility by complying with industry standards to help open new markets
    With Heretto, Schematron, and HyperSTE you will get one platform to create, manage, and personalize your enterprise knowledge for any audience, on any channel, and in any language. Join us on December 14, where we will discuss these values as well as how they are delivered. Presented by: Berry Braster has been in the technical documentation field for over 18 years and has helped implement content strategies, including the use of DITA and HyperSTE controlled language software. As Technology Director, Berry is involved with connecting technical documentation to IoT, and how to leverage on technologies like Augmented and Virtual Reality. Jarod Sickler is the Documentation Manager and a Customer Success Manager at Heretto. He’s also a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester, specializing in metaphysics and epistemology. His dissertation focuses on the role and importance of the grounding relation in the overall metaphysical structure of epistemic justification. Slowly but surely, he’s making progress on his thesis. If you’re in the market for an effective sleep aid, he’ll happily share his research with you. Whether it’s in his research, documentation, or customer implementations, Jarod enjoys thinking through complex problems and finding the simplest and yet most powerful solution. In his spare time, Jarod tries to convince his kids that he’s still cool. They aren’t buying it.
  • June 30, 2021 NXP successfully deployed a DITA CCMS in 2016, in a SaaS environment, to manage technical product documentation. A software and system upgrade to Tridion Docs 14 (CCMS) was planned in 2019-20 to take advantage of new capabilities, performance improvements, system and infrastructure updates. Managing a successful CCMS upgrade requires detailed coordination, planning, testing, communication, and execution. From the webinar, you will learn how NXP effectively utilizes SAFe methodologies, together with their CCMS vendor RWS, to manage and execute the upgrade. Noreen and Maria worked together to coordinate activities on an NXP Agile Release Train (ART) as both are SAFe-certified. Noreen heads the RWS core team, which consists of representatives from several NXP business lines. Maria is from IT, working as the upgrade project Scrum Master. Overall, the upgrade was a success, as it was completed on time and within budget. NXP did encounter some unexpected issues that were managed following this process. During this webinar, Noreen and Maria will discuss how the business and IT benefited by utilizing SAFe methodologies to document CCMS configurations, develop and execute test cases for upgrade testing, managed communications with RWS and third-party vendors, communicated benefits to the business users, and moved all users into an upgraded production system with minimal interruptions. Presented by: Maria Yenerich works as a Scrum Master within the NXP Marketing Information Technology (IT) group. With 20+ years of system management experience, Maria has an undergraduate degree from Creighton University and a Master’s of Business Administration from the University of Illinois. Noreen McMahan has a Ph.D. from the University of Texas in Austin. In 2008, Noreen joined a team deploying a new CCMS in a global company. For almost a decade, she trained users of the CCMS around the world. She authored the online training in the DITA environment using the same tools as the writers and engineers she trained. She began her role as NXP RWS Product Owner after working on a team that deployed SDL LiveContent Architect as the new NXP CCMS in 2016. Later, as the 2020 pandemic gained momentum, Noreen worked on an Agile team that successfully completed an RWS upgrade of the CCMS to Tridion 14. She, therefore, has experience in deploying a new CCMS and in upgrading an existing one. Chip Gettinger is VP Global Solutions Consulting at RWS, managing a team that works with customers in maximizing global content with RWS. He has experience working with customers to develop global content strategies, business ROI adoption drivers, change management, and technology adoption for component content management systems. He speaks and blogs about customer successes working closely with industry standards, partners, and customers in technology solutions and deployments.
  • May 26, 2021 What if the search function on your tech doc was providing personalized results and was as good as Google, reading the mind of your users and anticipating their needs? What about a search engine that learns and gets more accurate, more relevant and personal every day. What does it take to get there? It’s mostly about technology, but not only. It also requires information: about your content (metadata) and about your users (profiles). In this Webinar, we will introduce the challenges, review the possible solutions, and discuss what you need to have and do in order to support this shift to a modern user experience. Presented by: Fabrice Lacroix is a serial entrepreneur and a technology pioneer. He has been working for 25 years on the development of innovative solutions around search technology, content enrichment and AI. He is the founder of Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation.
  • December 16, 2020 A step by step guide to getting started with Schematron and Schematron Quick Fixes. Schematron and Schematron QuickFix (SQF) languages can be used to improve efficiency and quality when editing DITA documents. You can define actions that will add complex structure in your documents, or make modifications in multiple places or actions that will convert a structure into another. These changes are made by keeping the document structure valid and conforming to your project specification and will help the content writer add content more easily and without making mistakes. Join us to see:
    • How to create business rules with Schematron
    • How Schematron rules are applied
    • How to apply specific Schematron rules on all DITA files
    • How to develop Schematron Quick Fixes to make it very easy to solve the reported problems
    Presented by: Octavian is a software architect at Syncro Soft Ltd, the company that produces Oxygen XML Editor. With more than 15 years of experience in working with XML technologies, he contributes to a number of XML-related open source projects. He also acts as co-editor of the Schematron QuickFix specification developed by a W3C community group.
  • June 2, 2021 Various surveys are showing that the majority of the world’s leading companies have accelerated their digital transformation efforts during the pandemic – efforts that are not slowing down. This presentation will discuss the key role content plays in the field of digitalization, and what you should do to future proof your content while elevating your customer experience. Presented by: Berry Braster has been in the technical documentation field for over 18 years and has helped implement content strategies, including the use of DITA and HyperSTE controlled language software. As Technology Director, Berry is involved with connecting technical documentation to IoT, and how to leverage on technologies like Augmented and Virtual Reality.
  • May 19, 2021 Omnichannel experience is setting the bar for customer expectation and it’s putting new and increasingly complex demands on your business to deliver the right information where your customers need it. Writing for the web is not writing for omnichannel. Preparing your content for emerging technologies requires new approaches to content creation and delivery. It requires a microcontent strategy. Robust content management technology is certainly part of the solution, and your organization will be tempted to invest in new tools for chatbots and voice. However, before you go ahead and fill yet another content silo with zettabytes of information, instead make enhancements to the content creation programs you already have. Microcontent is the next evolution in structured authoring and will open new channels for your content while improving delivery across existing channels. In this session, we will focus on the missing link in a successful microcontent strategy: an intent-based writing methodology. We will highlight some key concepts that will help you to start looking at your content through an omnichannel lens. Presented by: Mike Rowlinson is the VP of Training & Content Services at Precision Content. Mike has been working in the technical communications industry since 2005. His core belief is that great content enables great companies. Mike’s division develops and delivers engaging and effective training and transformation engagements including the recent completion of the firm's eLearning product, the 15 modules self-paced, Precision Content® Writer Training. The training enables writers to create effective content so that staff and customers alike can find what they need and understand what's required quickly and efficiently.
  • April 14, 2021 Unsurprisingly, when it comes to the money your company spends producing technical documentation, your management knows the cost down to the penny. And when it comes to investing in THE content delivery solution that will streamline your work process, unleash your content, and transform your user experience, one question will arise without a doubt: “How much?” Meaning: “How much will it cost?" This can be a completely different conversation if you can turn it into “how much it will save” and “how much additional revenue it will bring to the company." In this webinar, we will give you a clear picture of the cost savings and gains a content delivery platform such as Fluid Topics can generate across three areas: customer and partner service, employee productivity, and client satisfaction. We will also give you access to a tool that will help you navigate scenarios and determine how long it will take to achieve a return on your investment by customizing the calculator’s numbers to fit your situation. Presented by: Geraldine Boulez is passionate about new technologies and their ability to solve people and business problems. This is what has led her to product management, marketing and business development positions in fast-growing tech companies and innovative corporations for over twenty years. Geraldine is VP of Marketing at Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation.
  • October 21, 2020 Thinking of automating your entire conversion process to DITA? Wanting to handle conversion work manually, in-house? Before you proceed, think about how the conversion could help you derive the benefits of DITA that you expect. A simplistic approach may allow you to publish something that looks just like what you have now. But a really good quality conversion will help you to leverage content reuse, personalization and multi-channel publishing, as well as making it easier to maintain and update your content. For example, will your conversion generate keys and keyrefs for variables? How about a relationship table, to prevent broken links? Will menu cascades be correctly marked up, for localization purposes? Presented by: Helen joined Stilo as a technical editor. She now works closely with Stilo Migrate customers, helping them to analyze their legacy content and configure appropriate mapping rules. She also provides Migrate customer training and support. Helen has helped Migrate customers to convert tens of thousands of pages of content to DITA and custom XML. Helen holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and has pursued graduate studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
  • Recorded on October 26, 2023 
       

    Comparing XSL-FO and CSS formatting is not straightforward. XSL implementations are not standing still: XSL formatters are still incrementally improving even though the XSL Recommendation has not been updated since 2006. CSS is definitely not standing still, although some of the modules most relevant to paged media are advancing slowly, if at all, and some paged media features have been removed in more recent Working Drafts.

    This will be a high-level view of the differences and similarities between XSL-FO and CSS, based on an extensive new analysis by Antenna House while producing the book “XSL-FO/CSS Comparison” that itself is formatted identically using both XSL-FO and CSS. It also covers some of the features of how the two versions are produced.

    Presented by Michael Miller Headshot of man with short hair wearing glasses

    Michael Miller is Vice President of Antenna House, Inc., a company that has developed one of the leading standards‐based (XSL‐FO and CSS) document formatting software products on the market today. Michael has a degree in Printing Engineering and Management and has been involved in high‐end composition, document formatting, and document management for over 40 years. He has an extensive background with structured data, including SGML, XML, S1000D, and DITA. During his career, he has worked in Europe and North America and has been involved in the implementations of some of the largest fully automated publishing and document formatting projects.

  • Recorded on October 5, 2023 

    If there’s one thing that never changes, it’s that everything changes. And when it comes to technical documentation, keeping on top of change can become overwhelming. Whether you’re releasing on the same schedule as the software you’re documenting, or working to your own time frame, deadlines add extra pressure. How can you be sure that you have control over the changes that are being made? How do you know that unintended changes aren’t slipping through the net? How can you satisfy regulators and keep them updated with requested changes?

    In this webinar, we’ll share our top tips for managing changing content and calming the cacophony it can create.

    Presented by: Tristan Mitchell, DeltaXML Tristan is Product Director at DeltaXML, a technology company with world-leading software products for the management of change in structured content. He has a deep understanding of DeltaXML’s product suite and loves to help customers create extra value in their content using change management. Tristan is a father to three daughters, a movie lover, and a keen runner.    
  • Recorded on October 25, 2023 
    Stilo logo Stilo showcases a comprehensive, end-to-end process for converting pharmaceutical documentation, beginning with the source DOCX Word file. This journey encompasses the creation of automation rules, execution of the conversion, meticulous quality assurance, and, ultimately, the seamless publication of the final output through Oxygen. Explore how Stilo's Migrate effortlessly addresses prevalent conversion challenges, including the precise identification and generation of product name keys, resolution of table alignment discrepancies, and an array of other crucial tasks. Dive deep into the intricacies of transforming your industry-specific content from its initial state, ensuring a flawless and efficient transition. Presented by: TJ Dhaliwal, Stilo Headshot of smiling man with dark hair and beard TJ Dhaliwal is a Technical Sales Product Specialist at Stilo, helping customers uncover solutions to their content conversion needs. With a solid technical background in engineering and a passion for public speaking, he’s successfully bridged the gaps between project stakeholders. As a problem solver, TJ has helped several enterprise-level companies convert tens of thousands of pages of their content to DITA.    
  • Recorded on September 14, 2023 
    colorful box next the words Kaleidoscope - Taking your content global Intelligent terminology retrieval and management with TermCatch and Kalcium Quickterm A centrally managed and validated termbase forms the basis for consistent and correct company terminology. One of the challenges of managing such a termbase is that terminology is spread across different areas of your company and is constantly being changed and created. In one department, a new Excel list suddenly appears. In others, your terminology runs free in all manner of texts, from technical manuals and marketing brochures to software user interfaces and your own website. But how can you capture this "wild" terminology, tame it, and integrate it into your existing terminology? And how can AI support you in this and other terminology management tasks? In our webinar we will show you:
    • Where terminology may be hiding in your company
    • How to extract, cluster, harmonize, and validate it
    • How to use AI in order to be more efficient in your terminology work
    • How the new TermCatch integration for the established terminology management and workflow tool Kalcium Quickterm supports you in this process
      Presented by: Klaus Fleischmann and Mikael Lundahl Klaus Fleischmann studied translation and IT in Vienna, holds an MA in Conference Interpreting from Monterey, California, and a MAS in Technical Communication from Krems, Austria. In 1996, he founded Austria-based Kaleidoscope, a company implementing content, translation, and terminology management processes for internationally active companies. Kaleidoscope develops online collaboration software for enterprise-level terminology workflow, translator query management, in-country review etc., making the translation quality process comprehensible and strategically manageable. In 2007, he became CEO of Austria´s leading LSP, Eurocom Translation Services. Always active in the industry, Klaus got voted into the Gala Board of Directors in 2015 and 2017   Headshot of man with short light hair and mustache and glassesMikael Lundahl works with language processes and language technology. From content creation to translation and publishing. From marketing material to technical documentation and software strings. His focus is on how terminology, with processes and tools, can support both the writing and translation processes. Fodina Language Technology partners with and sells products from Kaleidoscope and Acrolinx. But Fodina also develops tools that help customers to build their company terminologies based on existing documentation, standards, or competitor's web information. AI-supported term extraction from many file formats and automated clustering of identified terms into concepts. Through integrations to both Acrolinx and Kaleidoscope products, we have full tool support for the terminology process that we recommend customers to use. Our tools support working with terms in English, German, and Swedish.  
  • Recorded on September 13, 2023 

       
    Beyond the hype, what can GenAI truly do for you today? In this webinar, we will unveil six practical use cases showcasing the remarkable impact of AI in revolutionizing the world of Tech Doc.
    Join Fabrice Lacroix, CEO of Fluid Topics, in an insightful talk supported by two decades of research and development in LLM and AI. Gain valuable knowledge on how to enhance the tech doc workflow, from content creation to validation, translation, publishing, searching, and reading.
     

    Presented by Fabrice Lacroix

    Fabrice Lacroix is a serial entrepreneur and a technology pioneer. He has been working for 25 years on the development of innovative solutions around search technology, content enrichment and AI. He is the founder of Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation.
  • Recorded on: August 9, 2023   
        Authors, particularly non-technical ones, prefer to work in the familiar environment of MS Office. Office, which has been the de-facto standard for creating hand-edited documents for about three decades now, is a useful tool; however, using the output in any kind of standard environment can be tricky.  Converting from Office to PDF is a common function of many applications but there are some aspects to the conversion process which you may not have considered.  I will be discussing the pros and cons of various Office conversion processes and going over several use cases for using dedicated conversion software.

    Presented by Alex Critchfield

    B&W headshot of man with beard.

    Alex Critchfield is the Support Manager at Antenna House and has been working with automated publishing systems for over two decades.
  • Recorded on July 26, 2023 
    DCL logo: cube on the left and words DCL Data Conversion Laboratory Because most organizations want to streamline the content management process, erasing the concern of managing redundant content is mission-critical. However, with large document collections finding duplicative content or nearly duplicative content is extremely challenging. Harmonizer, by Data Conversion Laboratory, is a software application that analyzes document collections using natural language processing to identify redundant content. Harmonizer simultaneously analyzes across any file format – XML, HTML, SGML, Word, Framemaker, InDesign, PDF, and others – and is invaluable when planning a content reuse strategy or moving content to a new platform. Take part in this webinar to
    • Understand the relevance of identifying near-duplicate content
    • Identify ways to reduce translation/localization costs
    • Demonstrate content management cost savings to upper management
     

    Presented by Christopher Hill

    headshot of smiling man with short dark hair and glassesChristopher Hill is the Technical Product Manager for Harmonizer at Data Conversion Laboratory. Chris is an experienced IT professional who started programming in the 1980s. Since the early 2000s, Chris’ experience includes work as a support engineer, product manager, and user interface designer, helping organizations transition data and content to modern digital formats and platforms.

  • Recorded on June 29, 2023 
    In recent years the software industry has seen a rising trend towards lightweight documentation on the side of SMEs. While this may work on a small scale, it may get tricky when there is a need to interact with more corporate documentation environments. Bridging the gap between markup and markdown can present challenges not only on the technical level. So-called static site generators (SSG) are often used to bring Markdown content to the audience, focusing on speed, layout and ease of use, but they lack productivity features that are baked into DITA right away and essential to technical documentation. Enter a scenario in which you need to pull markup-agnostic content contributors to the other side and learn how Lightweight DITA might help you to foster collaboration instead of deepening competition. Let us see how far a walk with Hugo, a very popular SSG, can take us in this scenario and discuss the implications of a fragmenting corporate documentation landscape.  

    Presented by Frank Wegmann

    Frank Wegmann has 20+ years of experience in the markup world. Rooted in multilingual university research projects using SGML and XML, he has been advancing custom automated build systems for technical documentation at Software AG since 2001. In recent years the original focus shifted to DITA, and, inevitably, also Markdown. He is a regular speaker at international conferences and engaged in OASIS DITA committees, where he now also acts as co-chair of the Lightweight DITA subcommittee.

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